HE WHO HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY HE WAS HALF-INDIAN, HALF-WHITE. BOTH WORLD'S REJECTED HIM. BUT TODAY, JAMES BILLIE IS THE MOST POWERFUL CHIEF IN ALL OF FLORIDA.

HE WAS BORN IN DANIA, IN A CHICKEE hut behind the old Chimpanzee Farm on North Federal Highway.

The thatched hut was part of a Seminole Indian village built for the white tourists. The Indians were something to look at after you'd seen the monkeys.

The old Indians had wanted to stuff mud in the baby's mouth and leave him to die in the Everglades. That was the way the tribe took care of half-breeds when James Billie was born in April, 1944.

"Not all of our people were Christianized," remembers 62-year-old Betty Mae Jumper, who helped save the baby's life. "So James Billie's mother and I told the medicine man we would turn him into the white superintendent if he killed that baby for being a half-breed."

Forty-one years have gone by, and

now James Billie has grown up to become chairman and chief of the Seminole Indian Tribe, the largest and wealthiest in Florida. The tribe's business empire, based on bingo and tax-free cigarettes, stretches to reservations as far away as

Oklahoma and Washington State.

But James Billie is still very much a man alone. "That's how it is for a half-breed," says Betty Mae Jumper, a former tribal chairman herself, and now editor of the weekly Seminole Times.

AGNES BILLIE WAS still in her teens when her son was born. To earn a living, she sold Indian dolls and other souvenirs made by her mother out of corn husks and scraps of cloth. James, dressed in a tiny, rainbowed Seminole shirt, would play in the dirt beside Agnes' souvenir stand while the tourists gawked.

James's father was J.W. Barnett, a young sailor in the white man's Navy. James never knew him.

Barnett left for the war in Europe before his son was born. Agnes never told him she was pregnant.

"J.W. was short and cocky and laughed a lot," Betty Mae Jumper remembers. "Just like his boy James."

A few years ago, curious about his father, James Billie called all the Barnetts in the Jacksonville phone book. But none of them knew anything about a J.W. Barnett or an Indian girl.

James Billie is his white man's name. His mother gave him the Indian name of Whookipee -- which means He who has been taken away -- because she had stolen the seed that made him from the white man's loins.

A chill winter wind lashes the great green sea of sawgrass along the edge of the Tamiami Trail west of Miami. A small band of television newsmen huddles beside the road, cameras at the ready.

"There he is," one of the cameramen shouts.

Dressed in the brilliant costume of a chief, Chairman James Billie of the Florida Seminole Tribe Inc. has come to pay a ceremonial visit to the new chief of the smaller Miccosukee Tribe.

On a less ceremonial occasion, Chief Billie would have flown to the Miccosukee reservation in his gleaming Cessna airplane -- the one his tribal police confiscated from a couple of Colombian cocaine smugglers who crashlanded deep in the tribe's Everglades reservation.

But this is a special event and Chief Billie is traveling through the swamplands in the 21-foot dugout canoe he carved from a great cypress tree. He is wearing the plumed headdress, silver breastplate, shirt of many colors and deerskin leggings similar to the battle dress of the mighty Osceola, who fought the U.S. Army to a standstill in the 19th century. The Seminoles are the only tribe in America that have never signed a peace treaty with Washington.

"I bring you three gifts of power that you will need as an Indian chief in the white man's world," James Billie says to the new Miccosukee chief, a distant relative named Sonny Billie.

The first gift is a bundle of money wrapped in a green bandana. "It's what makes the world go around," James Billie explains.

The second gift is a $125 Mont Blanc Pen -- "To symbolize the power of the pen when you sign your name on tribal documents."

The third gift is the skin of a mountain lion.

The Miccosukee chief's eyes are tearful as he accepts the silver-beige pelt of the cougar.

"You have given me the gift of very powerful medicine," Sonny Billie says to James Billie.

According to legend, it was the cougar that saved the ancestors of the Seminoles and the Miccosukees when they became lost in a strange land. The Great Breath Giver sent the animal to lead the people to a good land filled with game.

That was long before the white man came. But the flesh and pelts of all great cats still possess strong medicine.

Not long ago, the white man almost put James Billie in jail for owning the skin of another big cat -- a Florida panther that the Seminole chief had killed in the Everglades.

The charges were dropped when a judge ruled that James Billie had the religious right to kill any animal on his reservation -- including those on the government's list of endangered species.

Today, Billie earns $50,000 a year as the elected tribal chairman and leader of the 1,700 Seminoles who live on 90,000 acres of reservation land scattered throughout South Florida. Except on the formal occasions that require Indian clothing, he wears designer jeans and a tailored Italian leather jacket, plays the guitar and dreams of making it as a country-and-western singer.

"I learned to live and I learned to survive," goes the chorus of one of Billie's songs.

James was smaller than the rest of the children on the reservation. His skin was lighter and his hair was curly.

"I spent the first few years of my life getting the crap kicked out of me," Billie says today. "But then one day I got mad and started kicking the crap out of the other kids instead.

"People respect power," he smiles. "White men and Indians alike."

James was one of the first to attend the white man's school in Dania. He was a reluctant student because his grandmother had told him about a young Indian who died with a lance through his heart for learning the white man's ways.

"You had to wear shoes to go to the white man's school in Dania," Betty Mae Jumper says. "James Billie threw his in the canal to keep from going."

It didn't help. "I just took James down to a church thrift shop and got him another pair," Betty Mae recalls.

James wasn't fond of school. Once again, he was different. This time the white kids teased him for being an Indian savage,just as the kids on the reservation had scorned his half-breed blood.

He would talk about it with his mother. "Don't worry about being an Indian or a white man," Agnes told him. "Just learn to be who you are."

His mother died when he was nine years old. Several of the old ones came in from the deep swamp to lead the ritual of saying goodbye to Agnes Billie's spirit.

But James refused to chase his mother's spirit into the other world. According to the ritual, he was supposed to scream while some of the older Indians fired guns in the air to frighten her.

Billie stood apart from the rest of the Indians.

"Don't go, mother," he whispered under his breath, hoping that somehow his mother's spirit would hear his words.

He felt the same way when his grandmother died a few years later. "I refused to help send her spirit into the other world," Chief Billie says today.

Years later, it was his grandmother's spirit that saved Master Sergeant James Billie's life in the jungles of Vietnam. He was in charge of what they called a Long Range Recon Patrol. Its mission was to probe deep into hostile territory and return with prisoners or information about the enemy's strength and position.

Sgt. Billie's squad was pinned down in a savage firefight. The only sign of the enemy was the blazing path of his tracers.

Billie was crouched down beside one of his men when his grandmother's spirit appeared in the jungle.

"Death is coming," she told him. "You must move."

Billie started to crawl away but his buddy refused to leave. The earth shuddered and a shell landed where Billie had been. His friend was killed.

Chief Billie has finished his ceremonial visit with the new chairman of the Miccosukees.

Instead of the traditional canoe in which he arrived, he is now heading over the Everglades in a chartered Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. "I've got to be at the reservation in Brighton in less than an hour," he shouts over the chopper's roar. "Flying's the only way to get around the reservation."

The Seminole reservation is parceled into five great tracts: the one in Hollywood, which is home for Chief Billie and the tribal headquarters; another in Tampa, with its huge bingo hall and "authentic" Seminole village for the tourists; a smaller cluster of farm shacks and homes in Immokalee; a sprawling cattle pasture in Big Cypress, deep in the Everglades; and finally a collection of small government-built houses in Brighton, on the western shore of Lake Okeecho- bee.

In the helicopter, Billie cradles a Panasonic OmniVision video- camera in his lap. "I carry it with me all the time," he says.

Sometimes he uses it to record tapes of aged Seminoles telling legends that might soon be lost. Other times he takes pictures of drunken tribe members. After they've sobered up, he plays back the tape.

"Most of them have no idea how stupid they look when they're drunk," he says.

Sunlight shimmers across the watery surface of the Everglades below. "We're over reservation land now," Billie says. "It hasn't changed since my grandfather was a boy -- only it would take him a couple of days to pole his way down from Lake Okeechobee to Hollywood in his canoe."

A huge, sun-weathered Seminole cowboy who herded cattle in Big Cypress, Max Osceola was one of several older men Billie still calls his grandfather. It was Max who taught Billie how to break horses and stay on a bull long enough to win a few bucks in a white man's rodeo.

Max and his wife Laura are dead now -- along with most of the white and Indian families Billie lived with after his mother died.

"I've always been a man alone," the chief explains. "I used to get in a lot of trouble for it when I was younger."

In Vietnam, James Billie learned that functioning as part of a group was sometimes the only way to survive. "I hand-picked each man in my squad," he says. "Each was chosen for his specialty. You see, I always had trouble killing a man with a knife. I never had any problem strangling a guy with my bare hands, but I just hated sticking a knife in a guy's neck while we were working behind enemy lines."

Billie calls this "delegating authority." That's how he chose the men who work in his tribal administration today, and that is why he hired white professionals to run his tribe's first bingo halls when the Seminoles got into the business a few years ago.

Today, the Seminoles earn nearly $5 million a year from the five bingo halls they've opened on Indian land in Florida, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Washington State -- all of them run in partnership with non-Indian entrepreneurs. The tribe's 25 tax-free cigarette stands generate another $2 million.

"Our budget was $9 million a year when I became chairman in 1979," Billie recalls. "Our people were totally dependent on Washington. Now, thanks to bingo and the cigarette stands, less than half our budget comes from the government."

The money is used for a variety of health, education and tribal housing programs, plus a profit-sharing plan that brings each Seminole $100 a month.

Not everyone is happy with Billie's bingo empire. Numerous law-enforcement agencies have sent undercover officers into the reservations in response to rumors of organized crime. "God knows how many times we've been investigated," Billie says. "But

they've never been able to prove a thing."

He smiles. "It's funny how the white man never bothered with us as long as we were just a bunch of Indians selling trickets along the side of the road."

He falls silent, studying the sawgrass and gator holes skimming by below the helicopter. He is watching for a plane abandoned by drug smugglers on one of the barren roads that wind through the endless sawgrass of the Seminole reservation in Big Cypress.

"It's a real nice aircraft," Billie tells the pilot. "Should be just ahead."

Moments later, the plane comes into view. It is a new twin-engined Queen Air. "Must be worth an easy quarter of a million," Billie says, studying the sleek yellow and white aircraft perched in the middle of the reservation road below.

As the helicopter circles, a man climbs from one of several dusty trucks parked alongside the aircraft. He is carrying a shotgun.

"He's one of mine," Billie says. "Part of the Seminole tribal police."

It was Billie who created the Seminole Police Department after he was elected tribal chairman in 1979. "The reservation was filled with drugs when I took office," he recalls. "All our young people were getting stoned on dope from the smugglers. You saw them everywhere."

The vast expanse of the reservation had become a no-man's-land for law enforcement. Night after night there was the drone of a doper plane making another routine drop.

"Something had to be done," Billie says. "So I got together a bunch of other guys who'd been in Vietnam and knew how to handle a weapon, and we went hunting for drug smugglers at night. We did pretty well, too. Got their attention after we blew away a few of their planes."

Some people objected to Billie's vigilante war with the drug smugglers. Only police officers were allowed to hunt dopers, they told the chief. That's when he met with Bob Butterworth, who was then the sheriff of Broward County.

Butterworth agreed to deputize some of Billie's vigilantes and provide them with equipment and trained deputies for backup -- as long as Billie agreed to train his fledgling tribal police force at a state-accredited police academy.

Today, the Seminole Police Department has 25 state-certified officers, with a budget of more than $650,000 -- all of it paid for with proceeds from the tribe's bingo operations.

"A lot of white men criticized me for those bingo halls," Billie says. "But our tribe needed money, and bingo was the easiest way for us to get it without having to go begging from the government again."

THINGS WERE VERY simple in Vietnam. Nobody cared if you were half-Indian or half-Irish. All that mattered was how well you fought.

It wasn't easy coming home from the Army. "All of a sudden I saw how poor my people were," Billie recalls. "At least half of them were living in thatched huts and shacks that were almost as crude as the ones the peasants had in Vietnam."

Billie hated the way so many of the older Indians had given up: once-strong young hunters now toothless alcoholics; once-lovely women now bloated diabetics from a life-long diet of sugar and starch.

Disillusioned, he thought of living in the white man's world and even tried dating white women for a while.

He was darkly handsome and they responded quickly to his easy charm. But something would always go wrong. Like when he'd try to explain something about his Indian past. Or maybe tell them how his dead grandmother's spirit was still with him. Or how his favorite dinner was a dish of gopher tortoise stew.

Billie got a job on the reservation, training Indians under a federal manpower grant. But a lot of the young people were poorly educated, having gone from illiterate homes to indifferent schools where they were shuffled from one grade to another.

"The spirit had gone out of our young people," Billie recalls. "They had no pride in themselves or their past. One of our people would die and I couldn't even get these kids to dig a grave. That's what a century of reservation-living had done."

Billie found himself studying the old ways and talking about Indian pride. He organized a Proud People pageant at the Indian village on the reservation in Hollywood, with dozens of young Indians learning the songs and dances and legends of the old ones.

It wasn't long before he began working at his heritage, lecturing on Indian culture at Broward Community College, studying the old ways under the tribe's 100-year-old medicine man.

It was around this time that Billie discovered the white man's fascination with Indian lore. Overweight real estate salesmen liked to wear Navajo jewelry, he learned; Coral Springs housewives would paying mega-bucks for hand-thrown Cherokee pottery.

So Billie became manager of the Seminole Indian Village, with its towering totem pole perched amid the truck stops and used-car lots festering along U.S. 441 in Hollywood.

Billie has always been a man who does it now and thinks about it later. So when the regular alligator wrestler showed up drunk for work one day, Billie took his place.

'It wasn't all that hard," he says. "I'd spent most of my boyhood jumping into canals and hauling out baby alligators to sell to the tourists for a quarter."

Billie became a national act. " 'Have alligator, will travel.' That was my motto. Took my alligators on the road during the summer and wrestled all over the United States and Canada."

He also started a company that built thatched palm huts for rich white people who liked having an authentic Seminole chickee in their backyard next to the pool. It wasn't long before James Billie was earning six figures a year and driving around South Florida in one of three autos -- a British sports car, a Lincoln Continental or a hot pick-up -- depending on his mood.

By this time he was married, to a Seminole girl named Bonnie. She is a member of the Panther clan; James is part of the Bird clan. But their three children will grow up Panthers, which means they'll have it in them to become strong leaders.

Although Billie was making good money -- "Living off my Indian mystique," he says -- he came to realize that few Indians were prepared to dress up like old-time Seminoles and pose for the tourists. Finally, Billie closed his Seminole Indian Village.

"You can't teach an Indian to act like one if he doesn't want to," he says. The trick, he explains, is to play at being an Indian in front of the white man without losing your pride.

Take the time Billie was having dinner at the White House a few years ago, seated to the right of President Jimmy Carter.

The soup course was served. Billie dug into his with pleasure when he felt an elbow in his ribs.

"You're eating your soup before the President has started," someone hissed in his ear.

"It doesn't matter," President Carter began.

"Shucks, Mr. President," James Billie grinned. "What do you expect from a poor old Indian boy who grew up in the swamp?"

THEY HOLD THE Green Corn Dance deep in the Everglades each spring. It is a time of renewal and the spirit of the Great Breath Giver is strong in the land.

James Billie is the bundle carrier for each Green Corn Dance. The bundle he carries is filled with certain herbs and parts of animals known to have strong medicine.

No one may speak of the power of the bundle or explain the ritual of the Green Corn Dance.

"Certain things are ours," Billie explains. "They do not belong to the white man."

Billie studied such things -- like how to kill and eat a Florida panther -- with the medicine men. Then, one night in December, 1983, a panther crossed Billie's path.

"It was a sign," he says today. "I knew what I was supposed to do as soon as I saw it."

Feeling the big cat's power, he killed it with a shotgun. Then he took it back to the camp he has built at the edge of a lagoon in the Everglades.

First he skinned the panther, wanting to preserve the pelt's special medicine. Then he roasted the meat over a fire and ate it with several dozen of his friends.

"A panther has many different tastes," Billie says. "Some of it has the taste of shark. Other parts taste like bear. And others are like deer. It's an unusual animal to eat."

James Billie mounted the skull in his camp and carefully dressed the pelt to use its medicine in future ceremonies. Nearly everyone agreed it was the act of a great chief.

But then the State of Florida arrested James Billie and removed the panther's skull and pelt from his camp.

Billie had killed an endangered species, the game wardens charged. There were less than 30 of the panthers still living in Florida.

"This animal was on our land," Billie replied. "Killing him and eating his flesh is part of our religion. The white man's government has no right to tell us what animals we can kill on our reservation."

The chief won. "But the state hasn't returned my panther pelt and skull," he says. "So I still don't have the panther's medicine -- which is why I killed it in the first place."

BILLIE'S HELICOPTER continues its journey northward across the Everglades. Now he is on his way to a Day Care Center for elderly Seminoles at the edge of Lake Okeechobee.

He is talking about old age and death.

"How you're remembered doesn't matter after you die," he says. "I had a dog once when I was a boy -- the only thing I was close to after I was orphaned. The dog's name was Yellow Eyes, Eee-tee-luk-nee in Indian. I always gave him the sweetest parts of anything I killed. When he died I carried his body into the Everglades and laid him in a special place where no one would bother him.

"Time passed. But I kept coming back to where Yellow Eyes lay. I could see nature at work. Small animals and buzzards ate his flesh. His body caved in on his bones. I could see the maggots moving under his fur. Soon there were only his bones. More time passed and eventually all that was left of my friend was his skull, bleached white by the sun and the weather. But none of this mattered. He'd been my friend. So the only monument that I'd made for him was the feeling I had in my heart.

"And that's how it will be for me and my people someday. A couple of hundred years from now there won't be any Seminoles. We'll all be intermarried and swallowed up by the white man and that will be that. The only thing left will be a few memories and some pictures in the history books.

"So all any of us can do is fight as hard as we can to hold on to what little the white man has left of our culture and our blood."